Cable CEO Michael Willner backed peer Jim Dolan today as the Cablevision-Fox retransmission dispute continued.

In his blog, Michael’s Insight, the Insight Communications chief said the prospect of Cablevision’s customers being locked out of watching the World Series raises the question of whether Fox has a public-interest obligation that goes with exclusive TV rights to the pinnacle of the nation’s pastime. He even raises the sensitive  prospect of “government oversight:”

“There is no question in my mind that Fox indeed has a corporate responsibility to refrain from withholding such an important event from consumers while they battle a distributor over money. They should do the right thing and simply call a cease fire during the week of the World Series and return the channel carrying the games to Cablevision customers.”

The FCC, meanwhile, has other advice for the 3 million Cablevision customers who haven’t gotten their Fox on since Oct. 16: Get an antenna and watch the digital over-air signal of the games if the outage persists. Not a bad idea, given that the online option after the fact hasn’t been completely predicable.

Fox offered similar advice:

“Unfortunately, it’s becoming clear that Cablevision believes FOX has very limited value to their customers. We urge those Cablevision subscribers who want to see the World Series (beginning October 27) to switch providers or purchase an over the air antenna now.”

Cablevision welcomed the FCC’s call to both parties to explain how they’ve been bargaining in good faith:

“Whether through FCC action, binding arbitration or any other means, the time has come for News Corp to end the Fox blackout of 3 million Cablevision households.”

Finally, the folks at UCBComedy.com posted a hilarious parody video of Cablevision’s blue screen of death. It’s pretty much an even-handed skewering. (Thanks to The Gothamist and Leslie Jaye Goff for the link.)

I none too sagely noted in print that there’s no precedent for having a big broadcast network off the air for an extended time (some affiliates have been off for weeks, though owned stations have been shorter outages). So I’ll spare you my prediction of how long this will last, other than to say it sounds like both sides are digging in.

Filling none of us here with glee.

Our last news issue of the year is a time to reflect on what 2010 brought, and what’s been lost.

And who are no longer with us.

The year began with the sad, surprising death of a longtime friend, Donna Garofano, SVP of government and regulatory affairs at Atlantic Broadband. She died on New Year’s Eve of 2009 at age 56 in Salem, N.H.. She had apparently taken ill while on a business trip. A veteran franchise negotiator with Cablevision and Ameritech New Media before ABB, she was funny, fiercely liberal and shared with me a love of the musical Gypsy. She is still very much missed.

In February, Howard Marcantel, VP of educational events at the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing, died suddenly after a heart attack, at age 47. The Louisiana native brought 17 years of project and event management experience in broadcast and cable television to CTAM, where he led the development of the content for the annual CTAM Summit and other educational events. He earlier worked at Discovery Communications, the National Association of Broadcasters and the NCTA.

Mike Connors, the first driver of the iconic C-SPAN Bus, died on Feb. 12 at age 61 after a long illness. From Racine, Wisc., he was the bus’s first driver in 1993, and over 17 years he logged more than half a million miles.

Paul Braun, the 30-year cable vet and programming VP at Time  Warner Cable’s National Division in Denver, died in March at age 58 after a long battle with cancer. He was best known as the kind-hearted and sharp-witted lyricist (with Erica Stull) of the song parodies performed by the Denver chapter of Cable Positive in an annual revue that, over the years, raised more than $1 million for charity.

Dean Olmstead, the 55-year-old president of EchoStar Satellite Services, died of cancer in October. The longtime satellite industry executive also worked at Loral Space & Communications, DirecTV, NASA and the State Department, joining EchoStar in 2008. He was a member of the Space Technology Hall of Fame.

To these and other absent friends — including Dane Hall, the VH1 Classic and QVC producer — a quiet toast.

It should not go unmentioned by Multichannel News that Flight of the Conchords has ended its run on HBO after two seasons.

So I won’t unmention it.

Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, the stars, posted a comment about it on their Website Friday and you can read it here. They’re happy about the way it ended, with the lads back in New Zealand after their New York City comical musical adventures ended with them getting evicted from their apartment (there was a dispute about currency exchanges.) Their Website has lots of other funny New Zealand news, including a TV interview with a guy who got stuck in a clothes dryer, so I recommend it even if the show isn’t coming back.

In the spirit of promoting New Zealand, a major thread in the episodes I have seen, I also read a story from The New Zealand Herald quoting Reuters quoting Clement saying it was very time consuming to write the scripts plus the songs in the episodes. The video here from HBO has a chat in the recording studio where the guys talk a bit about the writing process — does the story or the song come first?

I was a late comer to the series; fortunately there was a screener disk with the last four episodes on it, which my wife and I watched back to back to back to back one recent weekend.  Now I guess I will have to resort to Netflix or iTunes or something for the rest as HBO On Demand’s series schedule doesn’t include Flight of the Conchords at the moment. It does include Sex and the City, though, in case you can’t find those shows in syndication anywhere.

Edward Woodward is dead at age 79 and I have three things to praise him for.

The first is ‘Breaker Morant,’ a film that isn’t even mentioned in the obits I’ve seen this morning, including one on the BBC site.  It’s about Aussies fighting for the Brits in the Boer War and becoming “scapegoats for the bloody empire,” if dialogue memory serves and, from that film, it usually does. Toward the end, Woodward, playing the title character, a poet and warrior, recites very on-point lines from Byron — and inspires co-star Bryan Brown, as Lt. Peter Handcock, to intone a limerick starting “There once was a man from Australia” that I remember even more vividly. A terrific courtroom drama to boot.

The second is ‘The Equalizer.’  He played an ex-spy who offered his services for free to people in various forms of need. It was a favorite of my buddy Rich Katz because it showed New York City the way it really was in the rundown mid to late 1980s.

The third is EastEnders.  You’ll see from the BBC story linked above that he played a character on that longrunning soap last year. I didn’t know that and only watch EastEnders through the time warp of PBS, which locally shows episodes that first aired about nine years ago.

Cheers for that, Edward, and look forward to seeing your work as Tommy Clifford if the show is still on here then.

Time Warner Cable is hosting a Soviet-style election.

Its new Web site, Rolloverorgettough dot com,  has drawn more than 400,000 visitors, gathered more than 130,000 comments and more than 95% of the votes so far have encouraged TWC to “get tough” on programming increases rather than “roll over.” So said CEO Glenn Britt in a release, adding “our customers clearly agree that the current programming business model is broken.” Many commenters say they’d like the option to buy smaller packages of channels. “As an industry we need to listen to these kinds of concerns.”

Agreed. But the hilarious part — which at least two commenters on our Web site have already pointed out — is that the Web site also has two vote buttons. One says “Get Tough,” the other says “Roll Over.” But if you click on “Roll over,” the vote doesn’t go through that way. There’s some text that explains rolling over means cable bills will go up. Instead you’re offered a second chance to push the “Get Tough” button.

I’ve asked TWC to address this and will update this post if they do. Update: a TWC spokesman says if you hit “Roll Over” and enter a comment it counts as a vote the same as if you vote “Get Tough.” So TWC just gets a second bite at the apple to persuade you to vote for “Get Tough.” Confusing? I’d say so.

No doubt TWC faces tough decisions on programming costs, which analysts predict will spike for the cable operator this year, between retransmission payments to broadcasters, proposed regional sports network hikes and other factors. As Mike Reynolds noted in our first report on the TWC site,

“Time Warner Cable has been engaged in a long-running dispute with NFL Network, which remains on its distribution sideline over pricing and positioning issues. Perhaps more pressing is an array of expiring contracts with various Fox properties, many of which were set to conclude at the close of 2008, but were tabled until this year. According to sources, some of the properties involve include: FX, Fuel, Speed, Fox Soccer Channel, and a number of its regional sports networks. Moreover, Time Warner Cable faces retransmission-consent negotiations with Fox Broadcasting.”

TWC also faces tough competition, such as from Verizon FiOS in Manhattan, where I live.

Today, the FCC is expected to begin discussion on eliminating the so-called terrestrial loophole that allows cable operators to withhold some programming from satellite and phone company video providers if it is distributed by fiber and not by satellite. If and when that happens, it eliminates a key competitive advantage TWC and Cablevision have in New York: HD versions of Cablevision’s MSG channels.

All that’s to say, Time Warner Cable doesn’t have a lot of wiggle room to pass along big rate increases and wants to enhance its ability to tell the public: we had to drop or refuse to add this programming in order to keep your rates low. It needs political leverage with which to “Get Tough” with programmers. (Programmers reply: As if the house that Fred Dressler built hasn’t always been tough!)

Still, just for fun, I’d have liked to vote “Roll Over.” The contrarian in me just couldn’t resist voting “Roll Over.”